Welcome back to our ongoing analyses of clipping.’s Splendor & Misery. In case you aren’t caught up, we highly recommend reading the first part. If you’re a busy adult with many busy adult things to accomplish today (such as undermining the basic structures of our lives as we know them), here’s a summary: we’re in the future. Our protagonist, Cargo 2331, has seized the ship on which he was being ferried to a distant space war. The ship, in turn, fell in love with him (or, rather, its AI did) and now they are hurtling through space, jumping at random in order to escape their pursuers. This leaves 2331 in dire straits as his life literally flashes before his eyes every time the ship jumps and he is put into hypersleep. This is where “Wake Up” left us, with 2331’s mind slowly degrading as his history, genesis and family get left behind in the unfathomable millennia that are involved in any form of “realistic” space travel.

If there’s something you’d like to take away from my time writing for the blog, soon to be three years, it is this: no music exists in a void. Even the most extreme of releases or the most isolated of works are influenced by and, in turn, influence other works…